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Weaveworks Raises $15M to Grow its Container Networking Business

The new funding will help Weaveworks build out its container networking platform as competition heats up in this emerging market.

Container networking vendor Weaveworks revealed on May 11 that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding, led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and including the participation of Accel.

The new financing brings Weaveworks' total funding to date to $20 million. Weaveworks raised $5 million in its Series A round in December 2014.

"As is very typical, when we decided we wanted to do a Series B, we did the round of different venture capital firms up and down Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto," Weaveworks Chief Operating Officer Mathew Lodge told eWEEK.

The new funding will be used to help Weaveworks expand its commercial products and sales strategy. When it came to determining how much money the company needed, Weaveworks looked at the growth of the container market and what would be required to capitalize on the opportunity, Lodge said.

Further reading

Weaveworks' lineup includes Weave Net, recently updated to version 1.5, that provides a software-defined networking (SDN) layer for containers. The company also has a beta of Weave Scope, a visualization tool for container microservices. Weaveworks is also working on a new project called Weave Flux, which recently shipped its 0.03 update, Lodge said.

"Customers realize that the routing of microservices requests is a really critical component," Lodge said. "So we are evolving Flux to support the type of connection routing that customers want."

The basic idea behind the evolving Weaveworks lineup is to provide container networking microservices, enable those services to all find each other, while providing management visualization on top. The platform direction is to include Weave, Scope and Flux, first as a service and then as an on-premises platform version at a future point.

Weaveworks plans to make a few more announcements around cloud services in 2016 that will further expand the capabilities of the product platform, Lodge said.

This week has been a busy one for containers, with multiple funding events. On May 9, CoreOS announced a $28 million round of funding, as well as a new integration for its flannel container networking project with the open-source Project Calico effort.

Although adoption of containers is still in its early stages, competition is picking up.

"There is also a lot of confusion in the market, so anything we can do to reduce the confusion is something we want to do," Lodge said. "We want to make it easier for organizations to adopt microservices and cloud-native architectures, while also understanding how it all works."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter@TechJournalist.